META: Security spending to peak at up to 12 percent of IT budgets

Security budgets will stabilize at five to eight per cent in the U.S. by 2008 and in Europe and Asia Pacific by 2009, the firm said.

Currently, average infosec spending in Global 2000 companies is about four per cent of the IT budget, which is up from previous years, according to META. The rate of increase in security spending in Europe is much slower than in the U.S., mainly due to the less extensive publicity about compliance with regulatory mandates and cybercrime, META believes.

Infosec remains among the top five issues for CIOs, Tom Scholtz, vice president of META Group's Security & Risk Strategies advisory service, said in a prepared statement.

"Although capturing and benchmarking information security spending is complicated, security teams must model overall investment to track parity with industry peers and account for the cost of satisfying business requirements for managing information risk," he said.